Doubt Induces Economic Decline
Uploaded by Brent R Goodin on May 09, 2004
At the moment, the prospects of both the American and the world economies are horrendous; they are struggling to stay afloat and nothing looks as if it will change for at least the next twelve months. Regardless of all the monetary and fiscal policy put into place to decelerate sluggish growth and stimulate downward-spiraling economies, that which remains ever-present is an underlying uncertainty in the future. This debilitating lack of confidence is the catalyst for the all-encompassing decline in the economies. The major economies under scrutiny are America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region; all three economies are suffering yet for different reasons. Nevertheless, the net effect of this depressed situation is the same: low consumption and waning fixed investment.
America is the best of the three aforementioned economies. However, America continues to suffer from the collapse of the record long boom between ‘93-‘00. The Internet bubble has definitely taken its toll on the current state of the American economy. In the first quarter of 2001, there was a surge in the technology sector that created a bull market. This bull market produced a massive overcapacity of useless telecommunications networks, which consequently left a considerable debt. Since March 2001, the economy has been weak. As everyone is aware of the American economy’s fragility, confidence has dwindled. As a matter of fact it was documented that consumer confidence hit its lowest levels in March 2003. Lack of faith in the economy has had a knock-on effect of plummeting investment. Yet, reports now say that investment is on the rise. But since there have been so many previous false starts, especially in the past two years, I believe there is no reason for one to get his/her hopes up with the expectation that the technology business has finally found its footing.
As for George Bush, he has no idea what is going on with the economy. The American people applaud him for the tax cuts but the way he has gone about doing so is ridiculous. Now since he intends for these tax cuts to have long-term benefits, they obviously do not help anyone now, which means he is not stimulating the economy (that is what the economy needs). And what makes the situation worse is Bush is giving the tax breaks to the rich, which means...